The latest of which is the "Plant condition monitoring" application, developed by ENGINEERING and CRF (Centro Ricerche Fiat), a new predictive maintenance and quality monitoring solution currently being tested in a Fiat Industrial plant in Northern Italy.

The World Class Manufacturing Research & Innovation (WCM R&I) group of CRF is using vibration analysis in real-time, energy and water consumption assessment, to constantly monitor machinery performance and make sure the equipment is always kept in the best working conditions.

The welding cells of the factory are largely automatized, with robots moving on slides taking care of the welding in the lower part of the vehicles, whereas other robots perform the same operation on the vehicle's roof. Vibration sensors in the slide constantly analyse the level of bearing wear, while temperature and pressure sensors monitor the condition of welding guns' cooling waters and thus the quality of the process.

The data collected by these sensors is then sent to the Digital Industry Data Analytics (DIDA) Platform created by ENGINEERING, which processes the data coming from the shop-floor and provides advanced dishoarding capabilities to get insights from them.

"The DIDA Platform represents a step change on using FIWARE-based solutions in the manufacturing sector, paving the way to further exploitation of OS solutions in industrial analytics scenario. This approach will be further enhanced in the next year activities, by exploiting the processing capabilities provided by the Knowage Suite", Angelo Marguglio (ENGINEERING's Research Area Manager of the "Smart Industry and Agrifood" Unit) says.

Besides being trialed in the plant, the solution is also showcased in CRF's Melfi campus, where it is available for researchers to study in the lab-like environment, and for companies to test it on the small-scale production facilities of the Melfi Campus.

"We already had a monitoring system in place enabling us to quickly spot obvious issues, but we wanted to go one step further into data analysis through advanced visualisation techniques and identify incoming events. The next step will be to integrate other prredictive analytics strategies, and that is what we are working on right now," CRF's Mascolo says.

The official product launch of the "Plant condition monitoring" solution, following the Suzzara pilot testing, is scheduled for December this year.